


this is ordinary life

by Pentone



Series: when everything was new [1]
Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Bruce is Bruce and everything that that entails, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, Jason is Robin, Jason-Centric, Multi, Tim is in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-13 05:20:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11177913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pentone/pseuds/Pentone
Summary: The whole truth was obvious.He liked having him out there.





	this is ordinary life

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is Jason-centric and also Bruce-and-Jason-centric, set during Jason's tenure as Robin, pre-Garzonas.
> 
> Many thanks to [Cal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaliginousCandy) for the beta!

When Jason first enrolled in school, he tried to make friends. He did, because he was pretty sure a normal part of school was playing nice with your classmates. As it turned out, he couldn’t deal with pretending to give a shit about the pros and cons of Matteo’s or Charles’ or Meredith’s or whoever the fuck’s latest yacht trip. Whatever benefit he was supposed to get out of hanging with these junior yuppies wasn’t worth the effort he had to put into suppressing his urge to punch someone in the face.

The nasty little locker notes didn’t begin until after he started sitting by himself during lunch, and they stopped completely when the ginger from 7C who thought he was hot shit, Gene Wilkins, tried to get away with dumping the contents of his food tray on him in the cafeteria. It had earned him grazed knuckles, a trip to the Headmaster’s office, detention and a stern word from Bruce, but no one bothered him again after that, and there were no more nasty little locker notes.

So it’s weird that there’s a note today.

Jason unfolds it.

_Can’t meet up after school. Got some stuff going on at home so I had to head off. See ya soon maybe xx Rena_

He heads home early.

 

“I wasn’t expecting you back for another hour,” Bruce says, peering at him from over the Gotham Gazette. He always lets it flop down just enough to show his eyes.

The newspaper immediately flops back up.

“Yeah, well, my plans were a bust, so now I’m stuck spending my after-school hour with you.” Jason sits down on the spot at the table adjacent to Bruce. Alfred isn’t around, which means he gets to prop his elbows up onto the table and slump forward without a bushy grey eyebrow stabbing him in the guilt gland. He peers up at Bruce. Idly, he flicks at a corner of the newspaper. Bruce keeps reading.

“So, should we start our training sched early today or what?”

Looks like Bruce has prioritized finishing whatever the hell it is he’s reading over answering him, because it takes him forever to reply.

Finally, he puts the paper down. “Why don’t we watch a movie instead?” he asks, and it isn’t all that often that Bruce ever suggests anything fun all by himself, even though he’ll usually say yes when Jason suggests it. Jason grins and pushes himself off the table in one swift move. “Alfred told me that you need to analyze a piece of media for English and you’re having trouble on deciding what to pick. I have a suggestion or two.”

Or _two_? Watching one movie might not have cut into their regular training hours, but watching two will for sure. Jason shoots Bruce a clandestine look. In response, Bruce dips his head down to his level and mirrors it.

“Sweet,” Jason stage-whispers.

“Sweet indeed,” Bruce stage-whispers back, his voice a deep toe-curling rumble. It always feels like a victory when he can get Bruce to use lingo that doesn’t sound like it came out of an encyclopedia.

Jason hip-checks him on the way to the entertainment room.

 

It’s weird.

Sometimes Jason catches Bruce looking at him like… well.

All reverent. Like how some of his johns would look at him when he put his back into earning his money.

Except he isn’t dong that with Bruce. Not that he’d mind-- Bruce is easy on the eyes-- but he isn’t doing that, or doing anything with Bruce besides patrol and training.

(Which still weirds him out, because rich guy with fucked up night-time habits who lives in a big scary house with his butler plucking a kid off the streets sounds _exactly_ like the kind of story that ends in some whacky shit.)

He’s always doing something really damn inane whenever he catches that look. Like finishing off his history homework or kicking his booties up on the dash of the Batmobile or waking up from a nap. It makes him wonder if Bruce ever looked at the guy who used to live here like that, the one whose presence is all over the Manor even though there are barely any photos of him anywhere, and that always leads him to wonder what the hell it was that made the guy leave, because he knows that that guy had been an orphan too, and…

Isn’t his entire life right now every orphan’s cough syrup-induced fantasy?

Jason pulls himself up onto the pommel horse and starts on a wendeswing, or, as he used to call it, the Fuck This. They’ve been working on his peripheral vision as an adjunct to his physical training because you never know when a detail in the corner of your eye is going to help you solve a case, Robin, or whatever. Point is, it’s been improving, and it’s how he can tell that Bruce is looking at him like that right now even though he isn’t even kind of looking back.

It lights his spine up from the base.

But what’s scary is he doesn’t get it. What he’s done to earn it. Which means he isn’t going to be able to tell if he ever stops doing whatever it is he’s doing right, or stop himself from… he doesn’t even fucking know. Saying the wrong thing and fucking up whatever reason Bruce has for that look to begin with.

And if that happens, what then?

“Fix that elbow, Robin.”

Right. Yeah. “Easy,” he grunts out.

He fixes his elbow, but it’s not easy.

Way back, he used to keep a stash of silverware in a duffel bag under his bed. He knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth, but he also knew that if something seems like too good of a thing, it probably is. The plan was to hang out at the Manor until the other shoe dropped and then high-tail it with the goods. But weeks became months and the shoe kept not dropping, and he forgot all about it until he worked the streets with Nightwing for the first time.

Nightwing, who didn’t seem to like him all that much, which Jason couldn’t hold against him when it was so obvious that Nightwing didn’t like the fact that he didn’t like him way more. More importantly, Nightwing was off-the-chain _amazing_. Even after he kicked the shit out of ten armed dirtbags he still looked like he just stepped straight out of a fancy magazine cover, and he moved like silk, and Jason _still_ has dreams about the way he launched from a leg sweep to choking this thug with his thighs like it was nothing at all, and…

No matter what Bruce said, no way anyone would pick him over that.

So he checked on the bag, just in case.

When he did, the duffel was empty. Folded up into a neat little square.

Jason didn’t know when the silverware got reverse-ransacked. But he knew that it was Alfred and that Alfred didn’t tell Bruce, because otherwise he wouldn’t have heard the end of it. He hugged Alfred from behind the next morning.

The tinker sound of china tells him that Alfred’s coming down the stairs of the Batcave right now.

“That’s enough, Jay,” he hears Bruce say. “Take five.”

Jason launches himself off the pommel horse into an aerial flip, and he still stumbles on the landing, but he fucks it up less today than yesterday. He must have not been half-bad, because Bruce is doing his I’m-not-smiling-but-I-want-to-be face, so Jason puts his hands on his hips, throws his shoulders back and fixes his face into his smuggest grin.

“I just killed it. Time to lay on the praise. Where’s my trophy?”

And _now_ Bruce is smiling for real.

 

Rena is back in school the next week. She wears more colorful clothes on days when she’s in a good mood and darker clothes on days when she’s in a not-so-good mood, but he doesn’t think she realizes it, because he tried to ask her about it once and she looked at him like he just grew a pair of horns out of his head.

Today’s a grey sweater kind of day. Jason gives her his notes so that she can catch up on class, and once school’s out they head to the bleachers to make out.

Afterwards, as always, she lets him bum a smoke and slips one in his pocket for the road.

 

Being Bruce’s whatever means that every once in a while he has to put on a monkey suit with about as much give as a slab of cement and attend these parties where everyone smiles at everyone else without meaning it at all. All of it sucks ten different kinds of ass, right down to the tiny hors d’oeuvres, and seeing Bruce do the whole Brucie Wayne thing was only funny the first half-dozen times. Now it’s just annoying, so he slips out of the function room while Bruce is in the middle of talking to the mayor of I-don't-care to find a place to relax.

He’s just reached the third floor when he realizes it. That there was someone else in the stairway, timing their steps carefully with his.

Jason presses his body against one of the floor’s decorative pillars and steps out when he hears those quiet steps reach the top of the staircase.

“You following me, you little sneak?”

He’d used his Robin Interrogation voice. Which feels like overkill now, because turns out it’s… just a kid. Black hair, black suit, blue eyes. A whole head shorter than him.

The kid reminds him of a colt-- just as skinny, knobbly-kneed and skittish. One that’s gonna either make a run for it or piss his pants.

“I-- I--”

The ‘piss his pants’ possibility is beginning to look more and more likely. And, okay, maybe the kid just saw someone kind of in his age range wander off and wanted to know if he was going somewhere that wasn’t a total snoozefest, and if Jason can empathize with anything it’s how godawful boring this party is, so…

“Wow. Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.” Jason relaxes his stance. “What’s your name?”

The kid’s mouth flaps like a fish out of water again, but in an _indignant_ way this time. Whatever he was planning on saying, though, he apparently decides against it, because he shuts his trap, and when he opens it again all he’s got is, “Tim. Tim Drake. I’m… your neighbor.”

“My neighbor. Well, shit--” and Jesus, just swearing makes the kid flinch with his whole body. Now he’s kinda feeling like an asshole. He’s gotta figure out a way to make Tim stop acting like Jason’s gonna hit him. “I’m gonna be honest with you. I didn’t even know I had a neighbor.”

One second, two seconds, three seconds, five. Jason waits.

“Yeah, well. I guess it’s what happens when trying to traverse the distance between our properties would exhaust the resources of a small army.”

He’d been expecting a nod, maybe, or some monosyllabic noise of agreement. This is better. Jason smiles, and the kid almost-kind-of smiles back.

Jason: 1, World: 0.

Only Tim’s shoulders are still hunched like he wants to involute on himself and disappear. Jason has to work on that.

“I’m gonna catch a smoke outside.” He jerks his head in the direction of the balcony down the hallway. If he isn’t careful, Bruce is gonna smell it on him later, but he always brings one of Rena’s cigs for events like these, otherwise instead of smoking on the balcony he’d throw himself off of it. “Wanna join me or what?”

“I don’t--” The kid freezes. Then sort of… systematically unfreezes? “Oh-kay.”

He’s trying to sound casual. The barely concealed wince afterwards tells Jason that he knows just how hard he failed at that.

Outside, it’s dark, and the air is biting cold. He sits down against the railing, and Tim sits down next to him exactly three feet away, pulling his knees up to his chest and placing his hands over his ankles in a way that Jason can only describe as _calculated_. He pulls the cig and his lighter out of his inner breast pocket. Smoke wafts up into the air between them.

“So. Tim.”

Shit. What now? He can’t remember the last time he had a proper conversation with someone who wasn’t Bruce or Alfred or one of his teachers. Or Rena, but that isn’t really conversation so much as it’s killing time until they get to the bleachers. What do normal kids talk about?

“You wanna tell me what school you go to?”

One second, two seconds, three seconds, six.

“I think it’d be harder than not to find anyone of school age at this event who doesn’t go to Gotham Academy,” Tim answers, his voice all ironic. “Rich people, rich kids, rich school. Right?” And that makes Jason snort, but not for the reason he bets Tim thinks. He’s got no doubt this kid came out of the womb covered in trust funds, but he gets the feeling that Tim has a hunch about why Jason hates these parties, and he’s trying to play into it, act like he’s above being the rich boy that Jason knows he is, and _that’s_ funny.

“Okay, yeah, I go to Gotham A. Is that your way of saying ‘stupid question’?”

“It’s my way of saying I go to Gotham A too.” The purse of Tim’s lips is apologetic. “I’m still in sixth grade, so I’m on the Maryland campus, but I’ll be on the middle school campus starting next year.”

Next year… Jason’s gonna be sixteen. And in grade nine, jeez. That’s kind of trippy to think about.

“Am I going to have to worry about you following me around there, too?” Jason holds the cig out in Tim’s direction.

Tim hums thoughtfully as he takes it, looking at it the way Bruce looks at important clues under the magnifying glass in the Cave. There’s less tension in his shoulders now. “If I tell you, don’t I lose the advantage of deniability?”

Jason almost chokes on the smoke in his lungs.

“I’m no expert, but I think you’re supposed to wait a while before you let your inner freak come out to strangers.” He reaches out to sock the kid on the upper arm, and the kid doesn’t flinch this time, which is another win, and-- huh.

Okay, way more built than what he was expecting.

He doesn’t take his hand away from Tim’s bicep. Instead he squeezes, and--

Watches how Tim’s ears turn bright red. Interesting.

“Are you practicing for bully season or something? You weight-lift, don’t you? Don’t even try to tell me you don’t.”

“Yes, I do,” he replies. His tone is all matter-of-fact even though he’s starting to look more and more like an artist’s rendition of a ripe tomato. “But flattery about my physique isn’t going to get you anywhere. If this is the route you want to go down, I’m expecting dinner and a movie.”

Jason splutters. Tim gives him another smile: this one’s razor-sharp.

After that, Tim asks him about the junior high portion of Gotham A. So Jason tells him, about how one of the math teachers likes drawing these encouraging little doodles in the corner of test papers she has to fail, about the official make-out zone, about the homework load and how it’s doable but kind of overwhelming at first, especially if you’re balancing it with extracurriculars (for some reason, _that_ earns a snicker out of Tim), about how chemistry makes him want to choke himself with his tie, and…

He’s been talking non-stop for at least twenty minutes when he realizes that he hasn’t let Tim get a single word in.

So he stops to turn back to Tim and ask him if he has any questions, and that’s when he sees it. The look on Tim’s face, like how Bruce looks at him sometimes. All reverent. He’s right in its crosshairs, and it makes him want to shove the kid away, or grab him by the collar and shake him, or…

His watch beeps to let him know him that Bruce is done shaking hands with the fat cats downstairs.

Time to leave. They still have to hit patrol tonight.

Tim’s shoulders droop.

Jason pushes himself onto his feet with a grunt. “Gotta bail. I guess I’ll see you in school come spring time.”

Tim’s established himself as the type to take longer to answer than normal people, but Jason knows how to be patient. “I’m looking forward to it,” he finally replies, careful and even and serious. The cig Jason had passed him is still in his hand. With the way he’s holding it, it’s obvious he’s never touched one before in his life.

“Yeah, me too,” he says, and kind of means it. “Catch ya later, neighbor.”

Jason hop-skips past the balcony shutter doors and down the hallway. When he turns the corner, he glances in Tim’s direction just in time to catch this funny little wave.

Bruce is waiting for him in the building’s atrium, looking all keyed up and ready to go.

“Where did you disappear off to?”

“Makin’ a friend,” Jason says, leaning back onto his heels.

“Ah.” An _amused_ ah, as if there’s something funny about that. He decides that he’s keeping this one a secret. “And what is this friend’s name?”

“Aya-n’t want nothing to do with all those old people-berg.”

Bruce nods solemnly. “I’ve heard of her. Lovely lady.”

They walk out together. In the car, Bruce’s nose twitches once and then he looks all concerned, which means he smells the tobacco for sure. Jason’s gut tells him to swing his feet onto Bruce’s lap and smirk at him. He does.

Bruce gives him a measured look, as if he’s weighing something up in his head. Then the face of concern disappears. He pats Jason’s ankle and turns to look outside the window.

His hand stays there for the remainder of the ride. It taps the beat of the songs on the radio against his sock.

 

Today, Rena’s wearing a black sweater.

Rena likes to yap, but in the kind of way where she isn’t saying much of anything at all. Their conversations never get any deeper than talking about the latest episode of Fresh Prince or how dumb the biology teacher’s toupee looks, but ever since she came back she’s been wearing dull clothes every day, and in her note she’d written ‘Got some stuff going on so I gotta head off,’ not just ‘I gotta head off.’ And she likes him enough to let him stick his tongue in her mouth every day after school, so it must count for something.

It’s the third week of November now, so the air’s getting real chilly. Jason’s lips are still buzzing from the way Rena kissed him. She tucks herself into his side.

“Wanna talk about it?” he offers.

She doesn’t say anything, not for ages. Until she does.

“My parents are getting divorced.”

Jason knows Rena doesn’t like her dad. It’s not that she’s told him how she feels about him, because she hasn’t. It’s more the fact that she calls her mom mom but she calls her dad Barry, and it’s the way she says it, too, like he’s a bug on the heel of her Jimmy Choos. Jason calls Bruce _Bruce_ , sure, but he doesn’t say it like that.

“Which is like… yeah, whatever. They wanna get joint custody. Barry is gonna move to LA to be with his new girlfriend, and mom’s keeping the house, and I think I only have to spend a weekend a month with him, max, which means I don’t really have to go anywhere. So it’s not a big deal. I don’t care.” She sniffles. “I don’t.”

He nods and rubs her shoulder. She looks mad, but he knows she’s not mad at him, and he gets the feeling she’s not mad at her mom or even at Barry. “That sucks, Ren.”

The sun sets over the football field as she pretends not to cry.

“God, I got my gross snot on your jacket,” she says, once she’s all out. “Sorry about this, Todd. I didn’t wanna, like… unload all of that onto you. I know you’ve got your own stuff going on.”

He doesn’t know what she means by that, but that she’s worried about his stupid jacket makes his heart do this little twist.

Jason gives her a squeeze. “I’ve got a bunch of jackets, Ren. Don’t sweat it.”

 

The sound of a tree branch smacking against his window wakes him up at three in the morning. It’s been storming again, and he decides that he might as well sneak himself a cookie from the kitchen since it isn’t even his fault that he’s up.

He steps out of his room into the hallway, and that’s when he hears it. These ragged, ugly sobs coming from the crack in the double doors to Bruce’s room.

And he gets it. A few months ago Bruce asked him to put on his monkey suit and they took a stroll outside with Alfred to pay a visit to Bruce’s ‘rents even though it was pissing rain. They died a long time ago, but with the look on Bruce’s face when he ran his hand over the tombstone, Jason would have guessed it happened just yesterday.

He doesn’t need to ask to know that tonight’s about them, because with Bruce it feels like everything is about them, in one way or another. He enters Bruce’s room without knocking, and Bruce…

Bruce looks like what he thinks an exposed nerve must feel like. He’s hunched over his lap, the silk sheets crumpled at his waist, damp with sweat all over, and his eyes are wild and wide and red. His chest heaves like he’s just run a thousand marathons.

Jason gets the sense that he’s seeing something he shouldn’t be. Batman isn't _supposed_ to ever look like this. Maybe that’s why the sight of Bruce is making him feel… nauseous, somehow, deep in the pit of his stomach, like he wants to spew. But it doesn’t matter, because he’s Robin, and Batman needs him right now, and he gets that that means he needs to…

He crawls onto Bruce’s bed and places his hand on Bruce’s cheek.

He’s expecting Bruce to tell him to go back to his room. Or start a breathing exercise, or… or something.

Instead, Bruce breaks into even tinier pieces.

Jason overhears all kinds of shit he’s pretty sure he isn’t supposed to overhear in the Manor. Like that one tense conversation between Alfred and Bruce that sure as hell sounded like an argument about Jason getting his brain shrunk, the one that stopped abruptly as soon as they noticed he was there. They never brought it up with him, which was just as well, because he wasn’t ever gonna agree to that.

Or that one time Bruce said something like _Jason is far older than both you and I_ to someone on the phone in this tone that he’d never heard him use before. The words by themselves sounded like praise, but out of Bruce’s mouth they sounded defensive. That one fucked with him for ages, because he couldn’t even imagine Bruce feeling an emotion like ‘defensive,’ if that was an emotion at all. And he couldn’t understand what Bruce meant, because he sure as hell doesn’t _feel_ old.

And… he still doesn’t really get it, but he thinks he might understand better now. Because instead of letting go Bruce is holding him to his chest like a vice, one hand clutching his back, and he’s still breathing like he’s gonna die. He can feel all of Bruce’s most raised scars through the thin cotton of his night shirt, and he can feel Bruce’s million-mile-a-minute heartbeat thrumming against his chest. Bruce is shaking.

“Oh, _Jason_ , Jason, Jay--”

He just keeps saying his name, over and over.

And Jason still wants to puke, or do something crazy like grab his duffel bag and fill it up with silverware again, but… he’s Robin. So his arms come up, and he can’t really wrap them around Bruce’s torso the whole way without straining, but he gets there in the end.

And waits.

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimers:  
> \- Tim wasn't neighbors with Bruce until after his dad woke up from his coma  
> \- Tim was attending a boarding school pre-Robin  
> \- Gotham Academy didn't exist back when Jason was Robin (I think)  
> These details were disregarded to make things easier for me.


End file.
